The Assets and Recovery Agency is after Felesta Nyamathira Njoroge. Felesta is the 21-year-old university student with Sh. 102 million in her bank account which she received from a man who alleges to be her boyfriend Merc De Mesel. The agency says that the money in Nyamathira’s account is proceeds of crime and money laundering.
The agency has moved to court seeking orders to freeze the account of Nyamathira who is a student at the Nairobi Technical Training Institute. The account has Sh. 102,654,024 at the Co-operative Bank of Kenya.
The millions were deposited to her account in four split transactions in a span of three days from August 4 to August 6, 2021.
The suspicion over the money grew to a higher level after the man sent another batch of over Sh. 108 million to yet another girlfriend, bringing the total amount he sent to over Sh. 210 million. Apparently, in the same week Nyamathira got the money, 21-year-old Nairobi Technical Institute student Tebby Wambui Kago also received Sh. 108.2 million from the Belgian billionaire. She first received $631,071 (Sh. 71.2 million) at Equity Bank and later Sh. 37 million in the same bank. It also emerged that Nyamathira also got an additional Sh. 5 million from her Stanbic Bank account.
“There are reasonable grounds to believe that the funds held in the account in the name of the respondent, are illicit funds in which the respondent is involved in a money-laundering scheme designed to conceal and disguise the nature, source location and movement of the funds,” the ARA stated in court documents.
So who is this man? In a video shared on social media after the scandal first emerged, Mesel explained that he gifted the money to Nyamathira after following the right procedure. Mesel claimed that he was arrested together with his pregnant girlfriend over the money.
“As investors with every exchange and every bank, you need to do this constantly and there is a trace on where the money is coming from. It’s from my investments and my brokerage,” the bitcoin investor stated.
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“I knew there were more unlawful activities in Africa than Europe but without any notice, summon or question by police, suddenly being apprehended in my home, seizing my laptop, phone and passport, taken away handcuffed, as well as my pregnant girlfriend, I did not expect. Turns out we were believed to be part of a money-laundering scheme due to a bank gift I had made to my girlfriend, and for which we had submitted the requested paperwork to the bank. We are not feeling safe anymore in Kenya.”
Mesel grew up in Belgium, Europe, the northern Dutch part of Belgium called Flanders. He got into investments in 2008, and specialized in cryptocurrencies and stocks.